Hi, Ability Magazine, we are all differently abled.
Alright, so I'm Chris from Wheel. We have a very unique technology applied in the front wheels.
It's an omni-wheel which lets me turn sideways with a really tight turning radius.
It's actually four-wheel drive so it does really well on trains.
Grass, pebble, dirt, we can handle all that.
So it's pretty practical for daily use.
We have a control that's more of a computer mouse than a joystick.
So you slide it sideways.
I'm James McCarthy and I'm the president of HIMS, Inc.
We're an assistive technology company for products for the blind and visually impaired.
This year at CSUN we have an exciting booth.
We're introducing several new products.
The eBot is the first and currently the only iPad and Android compatible
reading, writing, and distance video magnifier with OCR text-to-speech available on the market.
It's very useful in the classroom for students because it's got reading, writing, and distance.
We don't want to design MeToo products.
We always want to do something new and unique and beneficial for our blind and low-vision consumers.
So our company is a French company created 20 years ago.
And we created the company on one idea to make the traffic lights talking to blind people.
The principle is quite simple.
When you come close to the traffic lights, you press the button and you would start talking.
And 20 years later, we have 100,000 traffic lights equipped in France.
We put the remote control inside the smartphone and we developed smartphone applications to communicate with the traffic lights.
My name is Thomas.
I'm with Uplus Technologies.
Today we're here representing a few different types of technology.
One that's really exciting is VoiceEye.
VoiceEye is a system comprised of a two-dimensional barcode and a smartphone application.
One of our great early adopters is actually Ability Magazine.
So Ability Magazine is the first major publication to utilize VoiceEye to make their magazine accessible.
So this is Betsy's interface and there is a camera looking at her moving.
Hi, I'm Sergio.
I'm the father of Betsy, Sergio Fernandez.
And I'm a software developer.
You know, since Betsy has CP, we've tried to get her to communicate with us.
And we have been very successful because she also has enough control to hit the buttons or enough trunk support to use eye gaze.
So I decided to build a system for her.
And the system basically is going to be using this camera, which is a perceptual technology camera,
that allows you to, allows the computer to see her movement and then it's going to use the iPad
and the iPad is going to hear her when she talks to select movies.
To watch Nickelodeon music say yes.
And you know, once we get her to consistently use the movement of the hand and the yes or no,
then we can really open the path of communication for her.
You know, we'll hope that she will end up using it in school and all kinds of situations.
Yes, we can!
Isn't that exciting?
As you can tell, she gets very excited about using it.
Because you know, for her, she's never been able to actually say what she wants.
So she knows this is the first time that she can actually choose, you know, one thing or another.
Yes!
Yes!
It's exciting, huh?
I got low vision when I was 17.
All of a sudden, you know, it was baseball season, I was a baseball player.
And I took a line drive off of my face.
Living with low vision is my life.
This has become my career.
You know, it's my passion.
It's my hobby.
So I'm really passionate about the things that we do and not because they're devices,
but because they help people.
When I see the smiles on people's faces and you know, they say thank you.
That's when I say, wow, I found my calling in life from my injury.
Nice to meet you, Ability.
